For first time in 14 years, Pritzker goes to Yank, who grew up in Gary

March 21, 2005|By Blair Kamin, Tribune architecture critic.

Southern California architect Thom Mayne, who grew up near Gary's steel mills and scaled the heights of his profession by boldly challenging architectural norms, was named the 2005 winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field's highest honor, on Sunday.

He is the first American to win the award in 14 years. The last was Robert Venturi of Philadelphia in 1991.

Mayne, 61, will receive $100,000 and a bronze medallion in a May 31 ceremony at the Frank Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago's Millennium Park. The pavilion is named for the founder of the prize.

Often called a bad boy--Mayne once grabbed a client by the collar and lifted him off his feet--the architect believes the label simply reflects his intense commitment to realize his visions.

"I think I'm being honored for having my own voice and fighting for a set of values," Mayne said in a telephone interview from his office in Santa Monica, Calif. "People try to tuck me away. They want me to behave properly. That's not who I am. I don't just say, `Yes, I'll do that.'"

In its citation, the eight-member Pritzker Prize jury, which includes Gehry and architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, called Mayne "a product of the turbulent '60s." It said he had carried "that rebellious attitude and fervent desire for change" into a series of bracing, large-scale projects.

They include the new downtown Los Angeles headquarters for California's transportation department, three federal government buildings that are under construction, a student recreation center that is to open later this year at the University of Cincinnati, and a competition-winning plan for a new Alaska Capitol.

First awarded in 1979, the Pritzker Prize is bestowed annually by Chicago's billionaire Pritzker family upon a living architect whose built work "has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment."

Consistent elements

While Mayne does not have a signature style comparable to Gehry's trademark wisps of curving metal, his work has certain consistent elements, such as perforated metal skins, double-layered exterior walls that save energy, and oversize, sculptural graphics that turn facades into billboards. Invariably, he takes on accepted ways of doing things.

The floors in Mayne's forthcoming federal office building in San Francisco, for example, will be narrower than those in typical American office buildings, bringing more inhabitants closer to daylight and outside views. Most of the building also will drop air conditio5ning in favor of natural ventilation.

An activist

"Architecture, on the whole, is not a strong profession," Mayne said. "I see architecture in a much more activist role."

Born in Waterbury, Conn., in 1944, Mayne moved with his family to Gary when he was infant and stayed there until 1954, when he left with his mother for an area south of Whittier, Calif. His parents divorced.

Gary's steel mills, which turned the night sky orange as molton ore was poured from huge ladles, "were in full force" in those years, Mayne recalled. His father worked for U.S. Steel.

But a more enduring influence came from Chicago, where Mayne's mother would bring him to Marshall Field's State Street store on birthdays and Christmas.

"My mom was a city person. We came in many, many weekends. My earliest architectural memory was going by construction sites [in Chicago in the 1950s]. When you're small, they seem much larger. I was mesmerized by the scale and the activity."

That interest began to blossom in high school, where Mayne took architectural drafting, and at the University of Southern California, where in 1968 he received his undergraduate degree in architecture. His graduate architecture degree is from Harvard.

Building on the legacy of such innovative early 20th Century Southern California architects as Richard Neutra, Mayne co-founded his Santa Monica-based firm, Morphosis, which means "to be in formation," in 1972.

In the same year, he helped start the Southern California Institute of Architecture, which remains a hotbed of avant-garde design.

Morphosis gained notoriety in the 1980s, with edgy Los Angeles restaurants and houses that departed from the postmodernism then in vogue. The firm shrank markedly during the recession of the early 1990s, but made a dramatic recovery with such acclaimed projects as the Diamond Ranch High School of 1999.

Located in Pomona, Calif., the school has two rows of sharply angular buildings, covered in corrugated metal, that climb a steep ravine and form a streetlike common space between them.

Last year, Mayne won critical plaudits for his Caltrans District 7 headquarters, a 13-story structure that, despite its brooding, battleship-like appearance, seeks to create a sense of place amid the pedestrian desert of downtown L.A.